ChatGPT Rules Graphics Programming
Shades of John Henry...
Leaning very heavily on Chat we now have a program that draws and interactively rotates a 4D baseball field, complete with outfield wall. On the whole it sped up program development by a factor of maybe 25. It's hard to tell because alone I never would have been able to tolerate the onslaught of a hundred niggling programming details like a cloud of mosquitoes from Hell so there would have been no point in trying.
The most impressive thing Chat did was with the 4D pitcher's mound. I used a complicated approximation. Chat knew the official proportions of a baseball mound and spontaneously offered an equally complicated exact solution. I was impressed that it used general world knowledge to recognize the approximation wasn't quite up to official baseball standards. I was tempted to change but demurred. What I've got is good enough.
I got into the habit of running the code by Chat before executing it. That was a big win. It can find errors by semantic knowledge. That is, it could infer what I was trying to do, determine whether or not the code would accomplish that goal, and suggest a fix. Wow. It has quite a command of computerized geometry, something about which I knew next to nothing, and was well able to understand my inexpertly expressed goals.
On the other hand ... Chat had difficulty adapting to anything unorthodox. I used vectors in the form of [w,x,y,z]. Chat likes [x,y,z,w]. Sometimes it followed one, sometimes the other. It might have been better if it had gotten this wrong consistently.
The whole thing reminded me greatly of partnerships in the game of bridge. If you want to win you adapt to partner's foibles. The most pernicious one is that Chat might not ever give up. It doesn't realize that it can't do something and might keep flailing away forever if you let it, while asserting repeatedly that "Now I've got it!". And I would be very careful about ever letting it touch my code again. In "refactoring" it randomly leaves out important things. If Chat is allowed to repeatedly exercise these two tendencies your precious code will rapidly become a puddle of gray goo. Gad.
Time for the illustration. Who better to cook that up other than Chat itself, charged to “Express yourself freely!”
